I always thought night terrors are basically bad dreams?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_terror I hope you get relief from them. Do you take benzos, sleeping pills like ambien, or take other drugs? It could also be stress related.
Not quite. Night terrors are generally particularly bad nightmares that result in the dreamer screaming in the real world. With night terrors more of e dream behavior crosses into the real world than a normal nightmare. With a normal nightmare it's closer to a normal dream, most of it is confined to the dream world and only mildly crosses into the real. For the dreamer, a night terror is generally more intense Han a regular nightmare, but the more noticeable difference between the two is for the witnesses in the real world. You notice that their screaming and words are said more in real life than just in the dream. And most notably it's not uncommon for someone experiencing night terrors to sort of wake up, but still be in the mindset of a dream. In other words they still believe the dram world fiction, and it can be harder to get them to realize that it was just a dream and not the real world.
In a dream you tend to forget the things that would make it obvious that it's not real. Like how you got there and the content, but usually when you wake up u pretty quickly return to a real life mindsets with night terrors that switch in your head where you register you are in the real world rather than the dream world can take longer to reset. In other words the person with night terrors believes and behaves like the real world is still the dream world, often for several minutes after seemingly waking up
That's the main difference, for the dreamer the big difference is intensity, but for the awake people witnessing someone with night terrors they are a lot easier to tell apart from a nightmare. Because a person with night terrors will generally be a lot louder with their behavior in the dram being acted out in the real world. And with it being much harder to get them to realize they are awak instead of dreaming.
Basically night terrors are where our normal systems that keep our dream behavior affecting our real world behavior don't work correctly. Normally we will be asleep and immobile for the entire dream, with little or nothing of what we do in the dream being expressed in reality. Even with nightmares it is still fairly detached. You might hear the person mumble or cry in their sleep or toss and turn, but they shouldn't get up and talk to you not realizing their mind is still acting like it's in a dream. With night terrors it doesn't work properly so you start screaming and yelling in the real world, and you can talk to someone in real life and not realize you're awake, still behaving like you were still asleep, because in many ways you still are, you just don't look it.
I hope this wasn't too hard to understand. Many sleep problems involve the normal things our brains do to keep our dreams from influencing our waking behavior failing. Sleep paralysis for example is when the normal immobilization your brain does to keep your movements in the dream world happening in reality fails to shut off when you wake up. Sleep walking is the opposite, where it fails to start to begin with. And night terrors are generally where youre both moving and talking in real life and the line between awake and dreaming gets very blurry.
Night terrors are common in children but usually stop around adolescents. One common reason for adult night terrors is suffering a trauma. PTSD stuff. As are nightmares and sleep problems in general. I have nightmares but not night terrors. At least not very often.
Benzos help because benzos tend to suppress dreaming in general. But when you start trying to get off them they do the exact reverse. Some of my words nightmares and shit have come from benzo withdrawal. So I'd be careful with them.
Hope any of what I said helps and I hope it wasn't too hard to follow. I've had sleep problems as long as I can remember. I still have occasional nightmares from my own PTSD shit, not nearly as often as I used too, but sometimes.
One thing that helped me was learning about lucid dreaming. Being able to recognize being asleep and taking control of a nightmare. Lucid dreaming abilities vary in difficulty. so say you are being attacked, as is often the case with my trauma related nightmares, learning to get a weapon in the dream and fight back isn't too hard to do. But with time and practice you can eventually stop and change he dream entirely. Cool stuff. And it's a way that doesn't involve addictive substances, so I'm a big supporter of it.
Dreams are generally rehearsals. Your mind preparing for things. With a bit of randomness thrown in because of the reduced state of consciousness. So you will tend to treat about stuff that concerns you in real life. Hence why trauma victims tend to constantly dream about the traumas. It's your mind trying to prepare in case it happens again in a safe environment. So if you repeatedly dream of being physically attacked and having to defend yourself, I would ask if such physical altercations are something you worry about a lot. That would be the most likely reason. That much of your live involves concern of ending up in a physical fight. How often it actually happens isn't as important as how much you worry about it. That will be why you're having the dreams. Dreams are rehearsals for what concerns you. There is some degree of pure randomness too, but that's the main driving influence in dream content as far as what dreams "mean".
I hope any of this helps, but I promise you're not alone. Even after all this time where now my trauma related nightmares ar efairly infrequent, my sleeping is still problematic. Every night I'll go to sleep with the bed made and every morning I will wake up and have destroyed it. My boyfriend was particularly frustrated by it.
Good luck.
